MIT World

MIT World offers free streaming video lectures of speakers at events that occur at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lectures cover a wide range of topics, but most are in the area of technology, science, politics, business, and where these areas intersect. Frequent speakers include Noam Chomsky, Lester Thurow, Walter Lewin, along with single lectures from Thomas L. Friedman, Jack Welch, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and many other leading thinkers and leaders in a variety of fields. All streaming video is of exceptional quality.

‘500 channels and still nothing on’ is the gloomy assessment of these two media experts. In fact, what the public receives via TV and internet these days is often worse than nothing, at least where news and information are concerned.

One of the web’s master entrepreneurs has devised a novel way to expand his domain. Jeff Bezos explains how Amazon, already home to 59 million active customers worldwide, hopes to beguile increasing numbers of developers to use web services that the company evolved for its own operations.

In this talk, Negroponte discusses the three modern changes that have defined the telecommunications industry-digitization, the development of packets, and the move to wireless-and ponders "what's next" for the industry that represents 5% of the world GDP.

In his unassuming way, Craig Newmark believes his eponymous website might just help nudge people toward greater civic engagement. While Craigslist.org “is a simple platform where people help each other out,” focusing on everyday needs like getting a job or an apartment, it is also a profoundly collaborative venture, with political potential.